Laurence Vance is an instructor at Pensacola Bible Institute and a freelance writer living in Pensacola, Florida.

Many Americans have at least some knowledge about the Stamp Act of 1765, so instrumental in setting the stage for the American Revolution. But who among us has ever heard of former United Nations Secretary-General Boutros Boutros-Ghali’s proposal for a “stamp tax on international travel and travel documents”?

Global Taxes for World Government, by journalist Cliff Kincaid, is a fully documented, penetrating look at the U.N.’s quest to further drain the wealth of the United States to finance a nameless, faceless international bureaucracy. A sequel to his earlier book, Global Bondage, this one focuses exclusively on the plans of the U.N. and its sympathizers to raise even more money to feed its already bloated bureaucracy (Boutros-Ghali himself took in over $300,000 in 1996) and further its agenda of international socialism.

Taxes are the food that every leviathan state consumes to stay in existence. Thus, just as in days of old, when “there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus, that all the world should be taxed,” it is only natural that a body like the U.N. would now seek a global tax. But what chance is there of that tax actually being implemented? How could the U.S. Congress ever consent to such a thing? The same questions were once asked about a federal income tax until it was enacted in 1913.

Kincaid not only documents the various plans for a global tax, but also the promoters and the purpose of the tax. While doing so, he exposes both the dearth of coverage of these issues by the mainstream media and the increasing glorification of the U.N. in the public schools.

Rather than send a bill to every citizen of each country, various schemes have been devised to implement a global tax. Kincaid mentions a tax on “speculative international movements of foreign exchange goods” and “international currency transactions,” or an “international corporate income tax.” Other proposals include a tax on fossil fuels and air travel, or simply a percentage of each country’s military budget.

The promoters of a global tax are a diverse lot. Kincaid identifies various notable individuals, including international financier George Soros, Boutros-Ghali, former Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbachev, the late French president François Mitterrand, economist and 1981 Nobel laureate James Tobin, and an assortment of current and former American bureaucrats. Several prominent environmental groups and left-wing U.S. foundations are also singled out.

Kincaid explains that the purposes of global taxes are often hidden under nice-sounding phrases like “protecting the environment,” “peacekeeping,” and “family planning.” But as he shows throughout the book, “protecting the environment” means the end of free-market capitalism, “peacekeeping” means war, and “family planning” means forced abortions.

The most frightening aspect of the growing power of the U.N. is in the judicial realm. Kincaid reveals the drive to establish an international justice system to prosecute “hate crimes” and “crimes against humanity,” and argues that the ongoing debacle in Yugoslavia is a test case.

Besides exposing the U.N. for the radical organization that it is, those who on principle oppose the twin evils of foreign aid and foreign interventionism will be pleased to find that Kincaid likewise skewers the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Fund, the World Council of Churches, and central banks, including the Federal Reserve.

The deficiency of Global Taxes for World Governmentis the author’s lack of understanding of the case for free trade. Kincaid seems to equate free trade with the current U.S. policy of managed trade. He laments trade deficits, dumping, unfair competition, corporate downsizing, and “foreign regimes that exploited our market.” But Kincaid’s economic ignorance does not detract from an otherwise informative and important book on a subject likely to be ignored by many.